Browse Exhibitions

The Atlas of Skin Diseases was among the first publications undertaken, in 1859, by the New Sydenham Society. Time-consuming and costly to produce, it was issued in seventeen parts over a period of twenty-four years. In this exhibit, Yale dermatologists Jean Bolognia and Irwin Braverman present the celebrated nineteenth century illustrations to a current clinical audience, making a relevant teaching point with each plate. Twenty-five of the Atlas’ forty-nine plates were selected for display in the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, although all are available online. They depict cutaneous diseases ranging from the common, e.g. psoriasis and eczema, to the rare, e.g. iododerma and systematized epidermal nevi. Examples of skin signs of systemic disease, including Addison’s disease, neurofibromatosis, and lupus erythematosus, are also shown. The emotional toll which these chronic diseases inflicted upon patients is a striking feature of the many portraits.

This exhibition highlights the lives and careers of Dr. Harvey Cushing's team of smart and dedicated women to recognize the ways in which they supported Cushing's work but also to honor and celebrate their individual legacies. Curated by Simbonis intern Emma Brennan-Wydra.

What is deafness? From a medical perspective, deafness is an audiological condition that might be resolved through hearing aids or cochlear implants. But from another perspective, to be Deaf (often spelled with a capital “D”) is to belong to a culture, with a shared language and identity. This exhibit explores how people have understood deaf communication and Deaf culture since the seventeenth century, with displays on the history of education, medical interventions, sign languages, and popular culture.

For well over a century, the tobacco industry has been selling smoke in America and abroad: marketing the very idea of smoking with the slick and calculated use of celebrity testimonials, promises of health benefits, memorable slogans, promotional sweepstakes, and more. Selling Smoke exhibits a wide array of tobacco advertising alongside anti-smoking campaign materials, drawn from the William Van Duyn collection of magazine advertisements, ephemera, articles, and pamphlets related to tobacco and cigarette-smoking. Additional anti-smoking posters from the Medical Historical Library’s collections represent national and international efforts to eliminate smoking worldwide.

Harvey Cushing (1869-1939) was the founder of neurosurgery as a surgical specialty. It was Cushing who developed the painstaking procedures and instrumentation so that entering the brain for removal of tumors would be not only feasible, but effective. A generation of neurosurgeons trained with Cushing, who is still revered in the field of neurosurgery. In addition, Cushing was a celebrated clinical researcher, an accomplished artist, a fine writer, a passionate collector of books, a medical historian and bibliographer, and the chief founder of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library.

In 1820 Queen Caroline of England was put on trial for adultery by her husband George IV, provoking an unprecedented media frenzy. The Lewis Walpole Library and the Lillian Goldman Law Library marked the bicentennial of the trial with a joint exhibition, "Trial by Media: The Queen Caroline Affair." Drawing on the Lewis Walpole Library's strengths in graphic satire and the Law Library's collections of trial accounts and illustrated legal texts, "Trial by Media" examines the role of print media in documenting the Queen Caroline affair and shaping public perceptions. The items range from mocking caricatures to political screeds and sober, journalistic accounts. Today these sources serve as a lens for studying gender roles, class divisions, publishing, political satire, and British politics.

In Boundaries of Romanticism, we highlight composers who stand (chronologically or stylistically) near the beginning or the end of the Romantic era. These include Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Rachmaninoff, and others. Each composer is represented by a musical manuscript, letter, or other item, such as an Austrian coin bearing Schubert’s likeness, or a program of a concert that Mahler conducted in Woolsey Hall.

The song “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” written by James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson at the turn of the twentieth century, is often known today as the Black National Anthem and is sung in schools, churches, and civic settings throughout the United States.

This exhibit offers a look at the creation of the song, and at the lives and careers of the brothers who created it, through primary sources held in the Yale University Library. It is intended to provide teachers and students at the K-8 level with information about the history of the song, but also to serve as a primary-source teaching tool that can be tied into various aspects of the curriculum at the teacher’s discretion. Captions are often minimal so that the material may speak for itself.

Co-education at Yale College began fifty years ago, in 1969, but women had been a part of the School of Music since its inception in 1894. This exhibit highlights a few of the women who blazed trails in music at Yale. Some of them made music as performers or composers, while others were active behind the scenes, building institutions as administrators or philanthropists. These women were not always welcomed, but they persisted, and they accomplished great things.

On September 13, 2019, we celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Clara Wieck Schumann (1819–1896), one of the most brilliant and influential musicians of the nineteenth century. Beginning as a dazzling child prodigy and ending as a black-clad “priestess” of high art, she was in the spotlight for six decades. She earned her greatest acclaim as a pianist, and she also achieved considerable success as a composer and as a teacher. She was a central figure in the lives of two other renowned composers: her husband Robert Schumann, and their friend Johannes Brahms.

Our exhibit features two manuscripts and two letters in her own hand, along with manuscripts by Robert Schumann and Brahms, as well as images and modern sound recordings.